J.C. Corcoran calls it “the darkest chapter of my professional career.”
The longtime St. Louis radio personality has always been known for irreverent, abrasive and edgy commentary. But this time he’d gone too far, and people were calling for his head. News stories, editorials and letters to the editor vilified Corcoran, who has frequently been tarred with the label “shock jock.”
A roomful of representatives from various interest groups met with station management and railed at them for hours. Eventually, the air was cleared and an accord was reached, but at no small cost to Corcoran or his reputation.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But this has nothing to do with the KIHT morning host’s infamous rant earlier this year when, angered by the loss of power at his house during the Super Bowl, he took to the airwaves to taunt an African-American Ameren executive in a racially stereotypical patois and threatened to climb atop the company’s headquarters and pick people off with an AK-47.
This particular episode is from 1990–91.
At that time, Corcoran helmed The Breakfast Club on KSD-FM, the second stop on his nearly quarter-century run up and down the St. Louis radio dial.
He’d become a target—Corcoran would say unfairly so—of The Riverfront Times. Though it was the RFT’s media critic, Richard Byrne Jr., who kept up the constant anti-J.C. drumbeat, Corcoran’s anger spilled out at one of the paper’s columnists, Thomas Crone, who questioned his musical taste in print.
Breakfast Club co-host Joe “Mama” Mason made fun of Crone’s photo, leading Corcoran to comment that it was better than the previous one, which made Crone look like “a big fag.”
The ensuing controversy, in which Corcoran was accused of gay-bashing, raged for months, ending in the confrontation between the radio station and members of the St. Louis gay community.
In his 2000 memoir, Real Life Stories of J.C. and the Breakfast Club … or 20 Minutes in the Dark With Madonna, Corcoran says this was the dawn of the age of political correctness; his intention was always to poke holes in the balloons of anyone he perceived as flying too high by virtue of their own hot air.
“Not one single person confronted the question: ‘Was J.C. a bigot?’” Corcoran wrote.
Flash-forward to earlier this year, when that question was asked repeatedly.
Corcoran’s Ameren tirade earned him a month-long suspension from KIHT and forced the station to accede to a litany of concessions to the African-American community.
It also placed the Sword of Damocles directly above Corcoran’s microphone. If he makes such comments again, Emmis Communications-St. Louis vice-president and market manager John Beck told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “He won’t be here anymore.”
But here’s a surprise: Though many might claim otherwise, Corcoran has never been fired by a St. Louis radio station for saying something untoward on the air. Of course, his sometimes tenuous employment situations were made even more so by the constant state of emergency that attends the firebrand host’s every move, not to mention the weariness of station executives who have to stand guard over their corporate properties. But in truth, Corcoran has been done in most often by contract negotiations that have foundered, format changes and, in one case, “philosophical differences”—never because of what some would call “J.C. being J.C.”
It’s hard to remember the state of St. Louis radio before Corcoran’s arrival at KSHE in 1984. His Morning Sickness program (later, less confrontationally, titled The Morning Zoo) rocketed to the top of the ratings in less than a year, buoyed by its host’s brash, insurgent style—and large doses of sophomoric humor.
“Sure, we’re a little dirty sometimes, and silly, too,” Corcoran would tell the Los Angeles Times in 1987, recalling his time at KSHE. “But if we weren’t consistently funny, it would never work. I’ve been called a scoundrel and a degenerate, but all I’m trying to do is be funny.”
The laughter stopped for J.C. at KSHE two years after it began, but not before a couple of memorable controversies.
One of Corcoran’s primary targets from the beginning was the venerable KMOX, whose style, to understate the case considerably, was staid and conservative.
Corcoran regularly fired salvos in the direction of the station’s general manager, Bob Hyland, and popular—indeed, iconic—on-air personalities such as Jack Carney. During one show, Corcoran commented that he’d recently seen Carney and that he looked “like he had one foot in the grave.”
Several days later, Carney died of a heart attack. The two incidents may have been unrelated, but that didn’t stop some from blaming Corcoran, at least indirectly, for Carney’s death.
Corcoran also garnered the unfavorable attention—is there any other kind?—of the Secret Service. During a discussion about his brief flirtation with actress Helen Slater, who, it turned out, was dating someone else, Corcoran cracked that he might have to follow in the footsteps of would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., who’d also pined for the attention of a famous actress.
The men in black failed to get the joke.
Another incident found Corcoran and his Morning Zoo partner John Ulett prank calling an airport in Tehran, Iran, using already tense U.S.-Iranian relations to fuel their fun.
His detractors found his stunts to be over the top, but Corcoran’s fans couldn’t get enough. Unlike just about anything else on the air at the time, The Morning Zoo found an audience by tapping into a brand of humor that didn’t have boundaries: You kinda knew you shouldn’t laugh, but most of the time you couldn’t help yourself.
Unfortunately for Corcoran, he shares with his hero, David Letterman, a propensity to bite the hand that feeds.
Near the end of his run at KSHE, Corcoran complained to listeners about the poor conditions in the station’s studios. Corcoran gave out the phone number of Emmis Communications’ corporate headquarters in Indiana and instructed listeners to call and complain. When they did, Corcoran was suspended indefinitely, a period that eventually ran to more than two months.
He returned to the air, but it wasn’t long afterward that contract negotiations broke down and Corcoran learned he wouldn’t have to suffer the poor conditions—or the airtime—at KSHE any longer.
At KSD, Corcoran enjoyed one of the longest periods of stability in his career, though it was not without turmoil.
In 1987 Corcoran and KSD’s then-parent company, Gannett, were sued by St. Louis Professional Cheerleaders and Dancers Inc., the company that provided the Steam Heat Dancers to perform at St. Louis Steamers games and various public events. One such appearance, engineered by KSD, was nixed by the company. Corcoran suspected that KMOX’s Hyland had a hand in the cancellation, leading him to comment on the air that Hyland could keep the dancers away from him now, but that he’d already “banged six of them.”
The suit, which sought $34,550 in actual damages and $2 million in punitive damages, was settled out of court in 1990.
Karen Carroll, the general manager at KYKY, also sued Corcoran and Mason for $1.5 million, claiming the pair had made defamatory remarks about her. Carroll had been a topic of discussion on KSD because her station planted a phony obituary of a contributor to a KYKY show in the Post-Dispatch as a stunt. She charged that Corcoran and Mason had defamed her by calling her “a sleazy whore.”
In what sounds more like Breakfast Club ad copy than a legal ruling, Judge Robert H. Dierker Jr. dismissed the suit three years later, calling it “a case of juvenile name-calling; offensive, crude, boorish and reprehensible, but not defamatory in law.” In a final flourish, Dierker concluded, “Stated simply, it is modern broadcast journalism at its best.”
Corcoran and his crew came under fire again in 1987, this time for reading portions of a Playboy magazine interview with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary who said she was raped by televangelist Jim Bakker. The station argued that discussion of the material was a legitimate news story—they were just breaking news of Hahn’s sensational claim.
What eventually sank their argument, though, was that after reading Hahn’s statement that Bakker had told her, “When you help the shepherd, you’re helping the sheep,” Corcoran cut loose with a series of “baaahs.” You know, just so no one would confuse The Breakfast Club with The MacNeill/Lehrer Report.
For its part, the FCC found the material obscene and levied a $2,000 fine.
The Secret Service paid another visit to Corcoran in 1989 after he went on the air to discuss the inauguration of George H.W. Bush. While talking about Vice President Dan Quayle’s ineptness, Corcoran commented that if President Bush were to be killed, the voters might learn a lesson. Again, guys in shades and earpieces = no sense of humor.
Corcoran’s KSD years were massively successful, but personal conflicts between him and both Mason (described in only the vaguest of terms in Real Life Stories) and general manager Merrell Hansen ended the show in 1991. Though Corcoran was the linchpin of The Breakfast Club, he became the odd man out and was handed his walking papers—but not because of anything he said on the air.
Thus began Corcoran’s years in the wilderness. In a move that seemed doomed from the beginning, he went to work for KMOX in 1993. True, Corcoran’s longtime nemesis, Hyland, had shuffled off this mortal coil a year earlier, but much of the on-air staff, led by the gravel-voiced Anne Keefe, still wouldn’t give Corcoran the time of day, much less a chance to prove himself in a new format.
Chafing at “traffic and weather together,” Corcoran lasted only a matter of weeks at the station before general manager Rod Zimmerman dismissed him over what he called “philosophical differences.”
Philosophical differences? Maybe Zimmerman was a strict Kantian. You know: “You Kant say this” and “You Kant say that.”
Corcoran moved over to 101.1 “The Fox” (later WVRV), where he managed to battle for ratings despite the station’s low-powered signal. Mostly, though, he battled with other radio personalities, most notably WKBQ’s Steve Shannon and D.C. Chymes.
It’s hard to say who fired the first shot in the war between Corcoran and his competitors, but Shannon and Chymes scored an illicit hit when they—as Corcoran claims—started the false rumor that his infant daughter had been born handicapped. Later, Tim Melton, a WKBQ intern, struck another low blow when he began using the girl’s name as a pseudonym.
The situation came to a head in 1994, when Corcoran and Melton were involved in a bizarre fracas during Corcoran’s live broadcast of a charity event. Corcoran charged that Shannon, Chymes and Melton had staged an assault on him and filed a phony police report, claiming that it was Corcoran who had attacked Melton.
When the case was decided in 1997, jurors awarded Corcoran $370,000 in actual and punitive damages.
Corcoran left WVRV in 1995. “Fired is too strong a word,” River City Broadcasting CFO Lawrence Marcus told the Post-Dispatch. The station was changing formats and had simply decided not to renew his contract.
In a move that proved truth is often stranger than fiction, Carroll, who had previously sued Corcoran for slander, decided to hire him and install him back in his old digs at KSD.
The fit proved to be as awkward as you’d expect, and one day a frustrated Corcoran dropped the F-bomb on the air. He was suspended, but returned three days later. Not long after, though, he was informed that the format was changing and his contract, which was set to expire, would be allowed to lapse.
At KTRS, Corcoran was an awkward addition to the team of Dan Dierdorf and Wendy Wiese, and he was out the door in two months. At KLOU, he returned to a more familiar format, but the show ended in an all-too-familiar mix of bad feelings, contract problems and a format switch.
Corcoran finally got back his groove, such as it was, at KIHT. Hired in September 2002—by Beck, who had been his boss years before at KSHE—Corcoran reteamed with Ulett, his long-ago Morning Sickness and Morning Zoo partner. The pair clicked like they’d never been apart. And for the first time in a long time, Corcoran was at a station where the format didn’t run counter to his sensibilities. By 2004 the Showgram had reclaimed the No. 1 spot Corcoran hadn’t enjoyed since 1991.
He told the Post-Dispatch’s Deb Peterson, “This is a 13-year monkey off my back.”
Of course, some continued to chafe at Corcoran’s on-air personality, but the Showgram went on about its business with calm efficiency. Or at least it did until that fateful day in February when the lights went out at J.C.’s house—or maybe the following day, when they went out in his head.
Sure, reminding Corcoran of his failures could on the surface seem like just another attempt to accentuate the negative—certainly Corcoran hasn’t forgotten any of it—but the irony is that the edgy and sometimes sophomoric humor that kept landing him in hot water never really became his undoing. In fact, it was probably the reason he’s stuck around so long: Listeners may not have known whether to laugh at him or curse him, but many of them couldn’t help but tune in.
And for all of Corcoran’s missteps, his fans will no doubt point out the positives—his revolutionizing of the medium in St. Louis, his championing of First Amendment rights, his charity work, his innovative broadcasts from Moscow and other far-flung locations, his Emmy Award–winning TV work. And on and on. Whether any of that ameliorates the negatives is up for debate.
When Corcoran returned to the air in March, he seemed chastened by his suspension, but he was also more than ready to get back to business. The taped apology that played several times over the course of the show noted that he was sorry for his remarks and that certain lines wouldn’t be crossed in the future. But that said, he would continue to do what he does in his own fashion.
Could anyone who loves (or hates) J.C. Corcoran expect any more? (Or less?)
